denyn1/aifeed-protocol

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Signed content permissions for the AI web.
Declare, sign, and revoke what AI agents may do with your content — and let agents prove it.
▶ Watch: How AIFeed stops web scraping waste
Website ·
Protocol flow ·
Benchmark ·
Complete guide ·
Paper (PDF)
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1-Minute Quickstart
**Publisher side — sign what agents may do with your content:**
Prefer zero config? npx aifeed init --domain example.com --dir ./site creates the keys,
a signed manifest, and the DNS/host setup guide in one step.
**Agent side — verify any domain in 3 lines:**
TypeScript: import { verifyRemote } from '@aifeed/verify';
Where to go next: Why AIFeed? · agent quickstart ·
publisher AI guide · Studio publisher app ·
npm: aifeed CLI ·
@aifeed/verify
Why AIFeed?
AI agents now drive a large and growing share of web traffic, but the signals that say
what they may do are **unsigned text files**. Anyone can edit them, nothing binds them to
a domain, and there is no way to revoke them. The asymmetry is measurable:
- **1.9 billion** crawls ignored robots.txt rules in a single half-year (one vendor).
- A **70,900 : 1** crawl-to-referral ratio was measured for a major AI provider.
- AI bots averaged **4.2 %** of HTML requests in 2025, peaking at 6.4 %.
AIFeed replaces "please respect this file" with a cryptographically verifiable
declaration, plus lean agent-ready content that cuts cost on **both** sides.
How it works
1. **Generate an Ed25519 key pair** — the private key never leaves the origin.
2. **Publish a signed manifest** at /.well-known/ai.json: per-use permissions
(training, retrieval, quote, …), crawl limits, license, revision.
3. **Anchor the key in DNS** (_aifeed TXT) so a manifest cannot be spoofed by another
domain.
4. **Agents verify the chain** — TLS → domain → signature (JCS + Ed25519) → DNS anchor —
and re-check a **multi-signature revocation registry** on every use.
5. **Rotate keys safely** — announce the successor with an old-key-signed directive (plus
an advisory DNS pk2 cross-check), keep a bounded overlap, cut over, then revoke the
old key permanently. Runbook: docs/rotation.md.
6. **Serve lean content** under one of two profiles (below), with a signed **delta index**
so unchanged pages cost 0 bytes.
**For AI agents:** the check-first guide (discovery → verification → permission
decisions → delta → failure handling) is in
docs/agent-quickstart.md,
with a runnable example at
examples/agent/compliant-agent.js.
Verify from other stacks
Independent Python package (standard library only):
Prefer the repository? The same CLI is here (zero dependencies, Node ≥ 20):
Two content profiles
| Profile | Media type | Extension | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| **AIFeed Markdown** (native) | text/aifeed+markdown | .aifeed.md | In-band signed policy block, token budget, translation alternates, triage metadata |
| **MAKO** (compatibility) | text/mako+markdown | .mako.md | External MAKO trust profile, served from the same signed bytes with its own signature context |
Dual-stack origins serve both; cross-format replay is rejected by design.
Measured results
All numbers are reproducible from committed artifacts (npm run bench:mako,
npm run bench:enforcement); the test environment is a single machine on loopback
networking with a synthetic 60-page corpus. Honest baseline included.